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“For ages, I’ve dreamed of a United States where Project Censored isn’t necessary, where these crucial stories and defining issues are on the front page of the New York Times, the cover of Time, and in heavy rotation on CNN. That world still doesn’t exist, but we always have Project Censored’s yearly book to pull together the most important things the corporate media ignored, missed, or botched.”
–Russ Kick, author of You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and the New York Times bestselling series The Graphic Canon.

“In another home run for Project Censored, Censored 2013 shows how the American public has been bamboozled, snookered, and dumbed down by the corporate media. It is chock-full of ‘ah-ha’ moments where we understand just how we’ve been fleeced by banksters, stripped of our civil liberties, and blindly led down a path of never-ending war.”
–Medea Benjamin, author of Drone Warfare, cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK.

“At a time when the need for independent journalism and for media outlets unaffiliated with and untainted by the government and corporate sponsors is greater than ever, Project Censored has created a context for reporting the complete truths in all matters that matter. . . . It is therefore left to us to find sources for information we can trust. . . . It is in this task that we are fortunate to have an ally like Project Cen-sored.”
—Dahr Jamail

“Project Censored continues to be an invaluable resource in exposing and highlighting shocking stories that are routinely minimized or ignored by the corporate media. The vital nature of this work is underscored by this year’s NSA leaks. The world needs more brave whistle blowers and independent journalists in the service of reclaiming democracy and challenging the abuse of power. Project Censored stands out for its commitment to such work.”
—Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and associate professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University

“Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.”
—Walter Cronkite

“Project Censored shines a spotlight on news that an informed public must have . . . a vital contribution to our democratic process.”
—Rhoda H. Karpatkin, president, Consumer’s Union

“[Censored] should be affixed to the bulletin boards in every newsroom in America. And, perhaps read aloud to a few publishers and television executives.”
—Ralph Nader

“Project Censored interrogates the present in the same way that Oliver Stone and I tried to interrogate the past in our Untold History of the United States. It not only shines a penetrating light on the American Empire and all its deadly, destructive, and deceitful actions, it does so at a time when the Obama administration is mounting a fierce effort to silence truth-tellers and whistleblowers. Project Censored provides the kind of fearless and honest journalism we so desperately need in these dangerous times.”
—Peter Kuznick, professor of history, American University, and coauthor, with Oliver Stone, of The Untold History of the United States

“Activist groups like Project Censored . . . are helping to build the media democracy movement. We have to challenge the powers that be and rebuild media from the bottom up.”
—Amy Goodman

“Project Censored brings to light some of the most important stories of the year that you never saw or heard about. This is your chance to find out what got buried.”
–Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

“Those who read and support Project Censored are in the know.”
—Cynthia McKinney

“Censored 2014 is a clarion call for truth telling. Not only does this volume highlight fearless speech in fateful times, it connect the dots between the key issues we face, lauds our whistleblowers and amplifies their voices, and shines light in the dark places of our government that most need exposure.”
–Daniel Ellsberg, The Pentagon Papers

“The staff of Project Censored presents their annual compilation of the previous year’s 25 stories most overlooked by the mainstream media along with essays about censorship and its consequences. The stories include an 813% rise in hate and anti-government groups since 2008, human rights violations by the US Border Patrol, and Israeli doctors injecting Ethiopian immigrants with birth control without their consent. Other stories focus on the environment, like the effects of fracking and Monsantos GMO seeds. The writers point out misinformation and outright deception in the media, including CNN relegating factual accounts to the “opinion” section and the whitewashing of Margaret Thatcher’s career following her death in 2013, unlike Hugo Chavez, who was routinely disparaged in the coverage following his death. One essay deals with the proliferation of “Junk Food News,” in which “CNN and Fox News devoted more time to ‘Gangnam Style’ than the renewal of Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ law.” Another explains common media manipulation tactics and outlines practices to becoming a more engaged, free-thinking news consumer or even citizen journalist. Rob Williams remarks on Hollywood’s “deep and abiding role as a popular propaganda provider” via Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. An expose on working conditions in Chinese Apple factories is brutal yet essential reading. This book is evident of Project Censored’s profoundly important work in educating readers on current events and the skills needed to be a critical thinker.”
-Publisher’s Weekly said about Censored 2014 (Oct.)

“Most journalists in the United States believe the press here is free. That grand illusion only helps obscure the fact that, by and large, the US corporate press does not report what’s really going on, while tuning out, or laughing off, all those who try to do just that. Americans–now more than ever–need those outlets that do labor to report some truth. Project Censored is not just among the bravest, smartest, and most rigorous of those outlets, but the only one that’s wholly focused on those stories that the corporate press ignores, downplays, and/or distorts. This latest book is therefore a must read for anyone who cares about this country, its tottering economy, and–most important– what’s now left of its democracy.”
–Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor of media ecology, New York University.

“Hot news, cold truths, utterly uncensored.”
—Greg Palast

“One of the most significant media research projects in the country.”
—I. F. Stone

2. The Budget Does Not Have to be Balanced on the Backs of the Poor

SYNOPSIS: Congress could go a long way toward balancing the budget by 2002 without slashing Medicare, Medicaid, education, and social welfare. In fact, the Washington-based Center for the Study of Responsive Law has identified 153 federal programs that benefit wealthy corporations but cost taxpayers $167.2 billion annually. For comparative purposes, federal support for food stamps, housing aid, and child nutrition costs $50 billion a year.

An analysis by Public Citizen reveals how Congress could balance the budget by cutting “aid to dependent corporations.” The federal budget and tax codes are rife with huge subsidies to business—the sums involved make traditional “pork barrel” spending look like chicken feed.

Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said the budget axe misses the subsidies for the wealthiest and most powerful U.S. corporations. “The proposed $250 billion, or 15 percent cut in Medicare, demands serious sacrifice from the more than 80 percent of seniors with incomes below $25,000—yet big corporations on the public dole are not asked to sacrifice at all.”

Following are some examples of corporate welfare that miss the Congressional budget axe:

Direct Subsidies: Under the Market Promotion Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1993 gave $75 million for overseas product advertising, including $500,000 to advertise Campbell’s soup and $10 million to promote beer, wine, and liquor.

Indirect Subsidies: The Forest Service, for example, spends $100 million annually building more than 340,000 miles of access roads through national forests to assist timber companies’ logging operations.

Bailouts: From Lockheed and Chrysler to the S&L industry, the bigger the failure, the more likely Uncle Sam will save it. The most recent example is the so-called “Mexican peso bailout”—more of a bailout for American banks, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals who made bad investments in Mexican bonds.

Below Market and Guaranteed Loans: The federal government loans businesses money at below-market interest rates, or offers the credit of the U.S. government as a guarantee to a lender if a business opportunity should go sour.

Insurance: Limiting the liability of certain businesses is a nuclear time bomb; the Price-Anderson Act makes it likely that almost the entire cost of a Chernobyl-style nuclear catastrophe would be shifted to taxpayers or the victims.

Tax Expenditures: The largest of all corporate welfare programs are specially targeted tax loopholes and provisions in the tax code. Citizens for Tax Justice identified $412 billion in potential savings over five years by closing just 10 tax loopholes.

Trade Barriers: For example, U.S. government trade quotas on imported sugar cost the taxpayer virtually nothing but cost consumers over $1.4 billion a year in higher sugar prices.

Giveaways of Government Intellectual Property for Private Use: Tens of millions of dollars annually fund research contracts to develop new drugs, aircraft for NASA, and weapons systems for the Department of Defense.

SSU Censored Researcher: Tina Duccini

COMMENTS: Author John Canham-Clyne notes that while “corporate welfare” was largely ignored in the past, it recently received substantial coverage and now “the budget debate opened a window for occasional presentation of the issue as a source of alternative budgetary savings.” However, Canham-Clyne continued, “It has not reached the same level of assumption as has the false notion that the budget absolutely cannot be balanced without slashing so-called entitlements. The media generally operate from a corporate conservative framework which assumes that taxes cannot be raised, the military cannot be seriously cut, and that ‘entitlements’ are therefore the only significant source of budgetary savings. This framework congealed over the past two decades, and because ideas like ‘corporate welfare’ were not discussed seriously for so long, the new conservative congressional majority was able to seize the high ground and dominate the budget debate.

“Thus, corporate welfare issues were presented in the media as a sort of quirky alternative, but reporters do not feel comfortable saying or writing without attribution that ‘Congress could easily save $100 billion a year simply by cutting corporate subsidies,’ as they do saying ‘if Medicare and Medicaid aren’t brought under control, they’ll consume almost the entire federal budget by the year 2050.’ The later statement is a nonsensical idea, and doesn’t lead logically to the conclusion that Medicare benefits need to be cut, but by accepting the assumption, the media have facilitated the asserted solution.”

If the public were better informed about the scope of corporate welfare, Canham-Clyne said, it “would understand better how the political economy functions: that the ‘free market’ is not the solution to every problem; that corporate CEOs who advocate ‘free market’ solutions don’t really mean what they say because their businesses generally benefit from federal subsidy; that the budget can be balanced without unduly burdening the poor, the young, the elderly; that our society is dominated by a very small number of wealthy individuals and large corporations; that our politics are driven by the selfish concerns of the creditor class; and that the policy wonks and pundits who appear on our television screens often haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about or else knowingly assert ideology as economic fact.”

Canham-Clyne said that the primary beneficiaries of the limited coverage given this issue are “multinational corporations, and the politicians and alleged intellectuals they purchase.”

“There’s no line item in the budget entitled ‘corporate welfare,’ which makes getting rid of it extremely difficult,” he continued. “A number of ad hoc coalitions have arisen around specific groups of corporate welfare issues, including mineral rights on public lands, white elephant nuclear reactors, timer roads, and so forth. However, there were relatively few victories in Congress this session, despite the supposed fervor for fiscal responsibility. Notably, funding for the Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor, a useless technology that benefits a single company, was eliminated in both the House and Senate Energy Appropriations bills. However, the mother lode has yet to be mined, and the assault on working families and the poor continues while corporations and the wealthy continue to stuff themselves at the public trough largely unscathed by congressional and media outrage.”